The Vinland Voyages, The Market, And Morality: The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik’s Saga In Context

Scholarship places the composition of the two
Vinland
Sagas in the Twelfth century, in the case of
The Greenlanders’ Saga, and in the Fourteenth Century in the
case of Eirik’s Saga. But like most of the saga-literature
the two narratives reflect a non-mythic oral tradition, linked with
the settlement and early chronology of Iceland and Greenland, the
general (if not the minutely detailed) trustworthiness of which much
research both literary and archeological over the last century has
attested. Quite apart from scholarly
and technical arguments, even the ordinary reader
must take the wealth of circumstantial detail and the laconic
matter-of-factness of the storytelling as signs of an essential
veracity. The two Vinland Sagas reflect the Nordic people at
a particular epoch: The transformational moment, namely, at the end
of the Ninth Century, when the old warrior-ethos began yielding to
the new Gospel ethos and when success in the market began replacing
notches on a sword haft as the paramount sign of masculine status.
Both The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik’s Saga
represent this change in the generational differences that
distinguish Eirik
the Red (above left) on the one hand from his male
children, especially his son Leif
(above right), on the other. (The two portraits, from the Sixteenth
Century and the Nineteenth Century respectively, are obviously
conjectural.)

I. Eirik the Red brashly and loudly elbowed
his way into the Icelandic literary consciousness. A testy and
abrasive man, Eirik came to Iceland with his father Thorvald from
Jaedaren, in Norway. The relocation became necessary “because of
some killings,” as both The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik’s
Saga put it. Thorvald settled at a place called Drangar in
Hornstrands, on the northern shore of the northwest peninsula of
Iceland. When Thorvald died, Eirik took for his wife Thjodhild,
bringing her to live at the place that he designated by the personal
possessive, “Eirik’s Stead,” in Vatnhorn. (There would be
several “Eirik’s Steads” over the years.) Thjodhild bore Eirik
a son, whom the parents called Leif. Eirik’s ancestral disposition
continued to assert itself, however: He picked fights with two
neighbors, Eyjolf Saur and Hrafn the Dueler, killing them both. The
local Thing or assembly met to outlaw Eirik, forcing him to
relocate again, this time to Breidafjord, where he settled anew on
Oxen Island. Peace remained elusive for Eirik, however: In the words
of Eirik’s Saga, the master of the farmstead “lent his
bench-boards to Thorgest of Breidabolstead”; when Thorgest failed
to return Eirik’s equipment, Eirik raised a posse against him.
Soon the whole district had split itself into warring camps.

Feuds of this kind afflicted Icelandic society
perpetually, entailing much bloodshed and waste. The institution of
the Thing functioned less as a standing parliament than as an
ad hoc committee responding spontaneously to a crisis –
typically to a feud – that, in the opinion of the community, had
exceeded the limit of tolerability. The members of the assembly
would act to banish one or both parties to the conflict. Being
declared outlaw meant that the proscribed person had either to leave
the territory or endure the risk of being a marked man, whose death
no one would raise his hand to stop and which no one would be
permitted to avenge. The Thorsness assembly, meeting to address the
argument over the bench-boards, indeed branded Eirik an outlaw, to
which condemnation Eirik responded by making ready his ship. In the
words of The Greenlanders’ Saga, “He was going in search
for the land that Gunnbjorn… had sighted when he was driven
westwards off course and discovered the Gunnbjarnar skerries.” In
need of elbowroom, Eirik, in company with his followers, found it at
last in Greenland, habitable in those days before the Little Ice Age,
and whose promising name Eirik coined.

Eirik resembles many another Icelandic goði
or chieftain (the word actually means “priest”). Consider the
case of Hrafnkel Hallfreðrsson, the protagonist of
Hrafnkels
Saga Freysgoði.
Like Eirik, but two hundred years before him, Hrafnkel came from
Norway with his father to stake a claim on hitherto untenanted
acreage in Iceland. He lived with his father until his late teens,
but then struck out on his own, establishing his household, Adalbol,
in a remote valley. Hrafnkel parceled out his claim to other
settlers willing to swear fealty to him; or rather, accepting the
offer implied the oath. The saga describes Hrafnkel as physically
robust, strong willed, and quick to follow up his anger with a blow.
Hrafnkel killed many men, but at the same he prospered. He made sure
that his tenants prospered with him, thereby winning their increased
and quite adamant loyalty. The case of Hrafnkel exemplifies the
degree-zero of the feudal principle, and the type of the goði.

Nevertheless, the survivors of Hrafnkel’s
hot-tempered outbursts grew more numerous. In their numbers they
became a force, which, under the leadership of the law-expert Sam,
brought its long simmering wrath against Hrafnkel. A cycle of
violence erupted that, after consuming many innocent lives, finally
saw Sam’s faction humiliatingly defeated and Hrafnkel on top again.
The last to die, a victim of Hrafnkel’s counter-violence, was a
brother of Sam who had been away from Iceland during the entire
episode – a merchant, not incidentally, who had returned rich from
a sojourn in Constantinople bringing with him a shipload of goods for
sale. The anonymous saga-author presents this final death as an
extravagance revealing the excessiveness of feud. During the course
of the action, when Hrafnkel experiences the lowest ebb of his
fortune, he forswears his cult-god Frey, saying that worship of the
Aesir has come to seem to him latterly like so much useless
gesticulation. The exhaustion of feud as an organizing principle
coincides with the exhaustion of the old religion. While Irish and
English missionaries played a role in the Christianization of the
North, so did those of Viking stock who went to serve for a time in
the Eastern Caesar’s “Varangian” guard. Sam’s brother was
such a man.

The market theme, while impinging only obliquely on
the story of Hrafnkel’s Saga, informs the two Vinland
Sagas directly; the Vinland Sagas, treating as they do
events at the end of the Tenth Century and the beginning of the
Eleventh, also make a theme of the Viking religious conversion.
Eirik, even more than Hrafnkel, seems to have grown skeptical of the
old gods, just as he seems to have grown tired of the violence that
his character had hitherto called forth wherever he exercised his
irascible presence. Greenland becomes the refuge where, laying claim
to new land like Hrafnkel, Eirik can exercise his leadership without
bumping elbows with neighbor-competitors. Eirik’s first trip to
Greenland has something of the flavor of a scientific survey; his
Greenland proposition to his prospective followers has something of
the flavor of a mercantile exchange. By a coincidence, the Norse
word for profit, góði, differs from the word for a
chieftain, or goði, only in the quality of its vowel.
Eirik’s mellowing shift in character forecasts the shift in Norse
arctic society from warrior-chief values to merchant- or
profit-values.

The Greenlanders’ Saga attests with
geographic punctiliousness how Eirik “found the country he was
seeking and made land near the glacier he named Mid glacier.”
Later: “He sailed down the south coast to find out if the country
were habitable.” Eirik’s Saga says that, “he gave names
to many landmarks there.” Altogether Eirik spent three winters and
three summers in Greenland reconnoitering before crossing back to
Iceland. “He named the country he had discovered Greenland,
for he said that people would be much more tempted to go there if it
had an attractive name.”

The scale of Eirik’s enterprise is impressive.
According to The Greenlanders’ Saga: “In the summer in
which Eirik the Red set off to colonize Greenland, twenty-five ships
sailed from Breidafjord and Borgarfjord, but only fourteen reached
there; some were driven back, and some were lost at sea.” Some of
Eirik’s followers did not take up the invitation at once, but later
saw in Greenland relief from low fortune. One of these was Thorbjorn
Vifilsson, who, according to Eirik’s Saga, counted as “a
man of considerable stature… a chieftain [who] ran a large farm.”
Eirik’s Saga gives a thumbnail sketch of Thorbjorn – the
father of Gudrid,
who would marry in succession Eirik’s son Thorstein and Thorfinn
Karlsefni, two resourceful explorer-merchants – that emphasizes
Thorbjorn’s wisdom and generosity. Thorbjorn fulfilled his feudal
obligations by serving feasts to his neighbors and endowing them with
gifts. When Thorbjorn fell on hard times, he told his friends: “I
would now rather abandon my farm than forfeit my dignity, rather
leave the country than disgrace my kinsmen. I have decided to take
up the offer that my friend Eirik the Red made to me when we took
leave of one another in Breidafjord; I intend to go to Greenland this
summer, if I can have my way.”

Thorbjorn auctioned his farmstead and used the
proceeds to buy a ship. Eirik’s Saga says that, “thirty
people decided to go with him to Greenland.” The Greenlanders’
Saga reminds its readers that these events happened “fifteen
years before Christianity was adopted by law in Iceland.”
Thorbjorn, however, had already converted to the new faith, in whose
morality he and his wife brought up their daughter Gudrid.

II.The Greenlanders’ Saga and
Eirik’s Saga depict Eirik the Red as a fighter but not as a
raider; he is an Icelander, not a Viking in the earlier, warlike
meaning of the term. Eirik’s Saga even links Eirik’s
industry to his troubles. Eirik incurred the wrath of Eyjolf Saur
when his slaves “started a landslide that destroyed the farm of a
man called Valthjof,” in retaliation for which, “Eyjolf Saur, one
of Valthjof’s kinsmen, killed the slaves.” For this, “Eirik
killed Eyjolf Saur.” The slaves were presumably working to improve
Eirik’s farmland, perhaps by constructing terraces on a hillside.
Even the feud with Thorgest of Breidabolstead began as a clear-cut
property dispute. When Eirik, who had made a loan of his boating
tackle to Thorgest, “asked for his bench-boards back… they were
not returned; so Eirik went to Breidabolstead and seized them.”
Both The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik’s Saga are
replete with the imagery of wealth and wealth-creation. In Eirik’s
Saga, for example, readers learn how, when Gudrid was living at
Arnarstapi with her foster father Orm, a man named Einar sued for her
hand in marriage. Einar, a “courteous man with a taste for the
ornate… was a successful sea-going trader,” who “used to spend
his winters alternately in Iceland and Norway.” One day Einar came
to Arnastapi. “He opened his bales and showed them to Orm and his
household, and invited Orm to have anything from them he wished.”

The opening of the bales is a positively
ostentatious gesture, a display of Einar’s prosperity, and
therefore of his eligibility. The bales themselves signify the order
implicit in commerce; they are the portable version of the well-kept
shop, whose owner knows the place of every item and whose arrangement
is not only inviting, but also helpful, to the customer. Einar’s
generosity to Orm itself has business overtones. Gift giving is a
precursor institution of the actual market. Gift giving, as
anthropologist Marcel Mauss points out in his Essai
sur le don (1924), creates a relation of
delayed reciprocity between the donor and the recipient. The
recipient must return the donor-gesture, but never immediately: He
may only return the gesture after a decent, but unspecified, interval
of time. The rules of gift-giving reciprocity vary with the
situation. Sometimes the donor leaves the decision how to
reciprocate entirely to the recipient; but sometimes the donor offers
a hint, thereby bringing the occasion closer to a genuine market-type
transaction.

Einar lets on plainly that he would like Orm to
speak to Gudrid on his behalf, making known to her the marriage
proposal. Orm fulfils the bargain, but sadly for Einar, Gudrid’s
preference lies elsewhere and she rejects his suit. The marriage
proposal belongs, as a species, to the generic domain of exchange and
contracts. Gudrid’s refusal reminds us that exchange requires the
free participation of the negotiators and the right to say “no.”.

Gudrid sailed with Orm and his wife Halldis to
Greenland, as part of the expedition organized by Thorbjorn. Orm and
Halldis took ill during the voyage and died, along with many others
of the crew. Gudrid survived, as did Thorbjorn, and when they landed
at Herjolfsness, a settler named Thorkel invited the beleaguered
voyagers to stay the winter with him. Eirik’s Saga, which might legitimately be called Gudrid’s Saga, narrates another complicated exchange that took place during the winter spent with Thorkel. This exchange involves a non-tangible, but culturally
essential commodity, one much in demand in the homesteads during the
Greenland winter. In Iceland and Greenland, the itinerant
seeress offered much-prized diversion from the
misery of the cold months. The seeress would sing songs, tell
fortunes, and perform household rituals for a price. Such woman
presented herself at Thorkel’s farm in full shamanistic regalia,
with “a blue mantle fastened with straps and adorned with stones
all the way down to the hem,” and carrying “a staff with a
brass-bound knob studded with stones” along with other specialized
accoutrements. Thorkel feeds her well, with “a main dish of hearts
from the various kinds of animals that were available there.” In
other words: Expensive protein in a time of gripping dearth.

As Eirik’s Saga tells it, the witch
requiring assistance to perform her rituals and Gudrid although
Christian by faith nevertheless knowing the old songs, Thorkel
prevails on her to take the role. Gudrid hesitates but then assents.
Gudrid at first sees an insurmountable contradiction between her
Christian belief and the heathenish character of the ritual. Why
then does she change her mind? The answer is that the morality of
exchange transcends the religious difference, at least in some
circumstances. The winter is hard, disease has reduced the
community, and people are demoralized; the witch-prophesies,
understood more or less as entertainment, promise relief to all and
sundry. The apparent contradiction vanishes. For Gudrid to
participate in the exchange means for her to reciprocate the
generosity of the host and to aid in a performance that she can
construe as charitable to all.

The witch is grateful. She takes care to prophesy fully for
Gudrid. The witch says to Gudrid, “I shall reward you at once for
all the help you have given us, for I can see your whole destiny with
great clarity now.” She tells Gudrid, among other things, that,
“You will start a great and eminent family line, and over your
progeny there shall shine a bright light.”

In spring, Thorbjorn sailed for Brattahlid, his
original destination and Eirik’s main settlement. According to
Eirik’s Saga, “Eirik gave Thorbjorn land at Stokkaness;
Thorbjorn built a good house there, and lived there from then on.”
Land, of course, is itself wealth. Eirik has claimed much land under
his title and has presumably been giving it away in parcels, as he
does for Thorbjorn. What does Eirik get in return? Like the feudal
king in his function as “ring giver,” but less formally, Eirik
puts his beneficiaries under the delayed obligation of his gift
giving; he buys their long-term loyalty by incurring their gratitude
through deeds of extravagant generosity. Eirik is the classical “big
man,” as known to anthropology. The big man, as Eric
L. Gans argues in The End of Culture (1985),
is “from the standpoint of the modern observer… the least
free member of his community” because “he works the hardest for
the least material satisfaction.”

How to explain this non-materially motivated
striving that increases its strength by giving its chattels away?
The big man’s liberty, Gans writes, “lies in the realization of
his desire for significance, which coincides with the production of
an economic surplus at specified times.” The big man produces his
own significance not passively from the mere fact of possessing “a
simple quantity of wealth” but rather “from the act of ritual
distribution [that he] perform[s] upon it.” The big man responds
to what Gans names “producer’s desire.”

According to Gans, the appearance of the big man
coincides with the breakdown of primitive, egalitarian society and
the emergence, in embryo, of the monarch. The insight is essentially
valid, yet in applying this analysis to Icelandic society,
difficulties immediately arise. Kingship had already established
itself in Norway, from which the largest number of settlers to
Iceland came, many with the motive of escaping the involuntary
obligations of a mere subject. Independence from mainland kings
indeed belongs thematically to the Icelandic consciousness. However,
Gans also sees the big man as replacing the purely totemic center of
a naively religious society at the moment when that totemic center
(under the image of divinity) begins to fail. (We recall Hrafnkel’s
repudiation of Frey.) When Eirik’s Saga says that Eirik
“was reluctant to abandon his old religion,” it implies that his
intention to keep faith with that creed fell below the level of
hearty conviction. Indeed, the final image in Eirik’s Saga
of its namesake’s wealth has as its context a Christmas Eve feast
at Brattahlid.

III. The mercantile ethosof the
post-Eirik generation in Iceland and Greenland corresponds with the
Christian ethosthat takes hold with the same generation.
Eirik’s exclusion from the Vinland expeditions belongs symbolically
with his dispensational ambiguity. Eirik’s son Leif – known as
Leif the Lucky – wants his father to sail with him. Eirik’s
Saga says that Eirik wanted to go but that on the day of
departure, “he took a chest full of silver and gold and hid it.”
The Greenlanders’ Saga says that, as Eirik rode to board
Leif’s ship, “he was thrown from his horse, breaking some ribs
and injuring his shoulder.” The same saga quotes Eirik as saying,
“I am not meant to discover more countries than this one
[Greenland] we now live in.”

Now Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson, in a
footnote to their Penguin translation of The Vinland Sagas,
remark laconically that “the burying of money was illegal in
Christian Iceland,” but not apparently in heathen Iceland. One
thinks immediately, in light of the scholarly note, of the Parable of
the Talents in Matthew (25: 14-30) and Luke (19: 12-28). The burying
of wealth is a hoarding gesture; something like a sacrificial
gesture, in which the worshipper consecrates some item of conspicuous
value to the idol of his god, thereby reducing the commonwealth. In
the Gospel parable, the good master rewards the servant who
multiplies the talents; he rebukes the servant who merely buried the
talent in the ground. Thus the “producer’s desire” to build a
surplus – to “grow wealth,” as people said in the 1990s –
corresponds to a positive sanction. Not incidentally the anecdote
about Eirik indicates that the beginnings of a money economy must
have existed in Iceland and Greenland at the time.

Leif the Lucky, the son of Eirik the Red, organized
the first expedition to those lands to the west that earlier wayward
sailors had sighted but which they had not bothered to explore. Leif
had spent a winter in Norway at the court of King Olaf Tryggvason,
who famously or infamously, depending on the interpreter, imposed
Christianity by fiat on his people. Eirik’s Saga tells how
King Olaf charged Eirik with preaching the new faith when he went
abroad in spring. Olaf said, “You are to go [to Greenland] with a
mission from me, to preach Christianity… Your luck will see you
through.” Once in Greenland, Leif advocated the Gospel
effectively, converting, among others, his father’s wife,
Thjodhild. Eirik’s Saga remarks how Thjodhild “had a
church built not too close to the farmstead” and how she “refused
to live with Eirik after she was converted, and this annoyed him
greatly.”

Leif’s expedition is the best remembered of the
Viking forays to the New World five hundred years before Columbus. I
learned about it in grade school in the Los Angeles public schools in
the early 1960s. A casual poll of my freshmen at SUNY Oswego
indicates, however, that Viking-North-American lore no longer figures
in the education of the young. The Greenlanders’ Saga gives
additional details of Leif’s voyage, which used a single ship, than
does Eirik’s Saga. According to The Greenlanders’
Saga, the voyage went smoothly. After an unspecified time at sea
Leif sighted the last of the lands previously sighted by Bjarni
Herjolfsson when he was blown off course on his way to Greenland.
Leif “lowered a boat and landed.” In the description, “there
was no grass to be seen, and the hinterland was covered with great
glaciers.” This coast Leif named Helluland (“Slab Land”),
whose inhospitable character urged him onward in search of better
prospects.

Next Leif went ashore in Markland (“Land of
the Soil”), as he dubbed it, a place “flat and wooded, with white
sandy beaches wherever they went.” Neither did they linger there,
however, but pushing on again, came to a third place, Vinland.
Landing, “they carried their hammocks ashore and put up booths.”
The “booths” (sod houses) have since been excavated at L’anse
aux meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland.

Geographical exploration and economic exploitation go hand in
hand. Leif sent out surveying parties. The Greenlanders’ Saga
reports that, “There was no lack of salmon in the river or
lake, bigger salmon than they had ever seen.” Leif’s men would
have begun immediately to catch and preserve salmon. Leif’s German
companion, Tyrkir, who returns from a solitary reconnaissance quite
drunk, discovered the namesake vines. (Grapes can ferment while
still hanging in bunches.) Leif issued the order, “On alternate
days we must gather grapes and cut vines, and then fell trees, to
make a cargo for my ship.” On the return trip, nearing Greenland,
Leif sighted a ship stranded on a reef. He spoke her skipper,
Thorir, offering rescue. Here again, the ethics of exchange come
into play. The Greenlanders’ Saga says that, “Leif
rescued fifteen people in all” and that “he gained greatly in
wealth and reputation.” Later, he went “to fetch the timber that
Thorir left on the reef,” the right of salvage being implied by the
rescue. As Leif settled down with his wealth, the torch of
exploration passed to his younger brother Thorvald, who would make
the second expedition to Vinland, using Leif’s ship.

It was during Thorvald’s expedition that the Norsemen first
encountered the people whom they called Skraelings, or
“wretches,” and fell afoul of them. The Skraelings
attacked the Norsemen. Before the defenders drove off the attackers,
a hostile arrow struck Thorvald in the armpit, fatally wounding him.
Thorvald’s men buried their chief, as he had instructed them, with
crosses for grave markers at his head and feet. Without their
leader, Thorvald’s crewmen nevertheless productively “spent the
winter [in Vinland] and gathered grapes and vines as cargo for the
ship,” after which, in spring, they returned to Greenland.
Thorstein Eiriksson wanted to return to Vinland to retrieve his
brother’s body, but bad weather at sea meant that he had to winter
in Greenland, where took ill and died. Gudrid, now Thorstein’s
widow, went to live with her brother-in-law Leif; a short while later
Gudrid married Thorfinn Karlsefni, “a man of considerable wealth.”

Gudrid now becomes prominent in the Vinland project. She “kept
urging Karlsefni to make the voyage,” in which she intended to
participate. “In the end he decided to sail and gathered a company
of sixty men and five women.” A detail of participation merits
attention: Karlsefni “made an agreement with his crew that everyone
would share equally in whatever profits the expedition might yield.”
It was something like a joint-stock company. Karlsefni asked Leif
whether he could have Leif’s houses, but Leif only agreed, “to
lend them.” Karlsefni much less resembles a classical big man than
does Eirik or even Leif, representing himself as equal, in theory,
with his collaborators. Another provocative detail of Karlsefni’s
expedition is that is that it “took livestock of all kinds, for
[the company] intended to make a permanent settlement there if
possible.”

Of the four, recorded Vinland forays, the two sagas, but
especially Eirik’s Saga, devote the most plentiful
description to Karlsefni’s. Once again, but with even greater
emphasis than in the earlier forays, the interest for the
storytellers lies in the richness of Vinland’s resources and the
commercial profit to be extracted from them by the industrious
entrepreneurs. The Skraelings make another appearance.

IV. After Karlsefni’s Vinland expedition (1007 – 1011)
there occurred one more recorded expedition to that destination, the
one undertaken by Eirik’s daughter Freydis in cooperation with two
brothers, Helgi and Finnbogi. Both The Greenlanders’ Saga and
Eirik’s Saga contrast the two expeditions – that of
Karlsefni and that of Freydis – from a specifically moral
perspective that communicates with the mercantile ethos that the two
Vinland Sagas celebrate. The matter-of-fact report of the
voyage signifies that the sailors had begun to address the sea-route
as something confidently known: “They put to sea and arrived safe
at Leif’s Houses and carried their hammocks ashore,” as The
Greenlanders’ Saga says. The colonists – that word seems
appropriate in context – freed their livestock to graze. When the
saga remarks that, “the male beasts became very frisky,” the
phrase implies the forthcoming multiplication of the herd, an augury
of material gain. Like Thorvald, Karlsefni has a keen eye for
exploitable resource. He “ordered timber to be felled and cut into
lengths for a cargo for the ship, and it was left out on a rock to
season.” The Skraelings meanwhile show up, carrying bundles
of “furs, sables, and pelts of all kinds,” but the unfamiliar
bellowing of the bulls at first frightens them off.

Karlsefni’s interactions with the Skraelings signify his
intuitive sense for cultural difference and his alacrity concerning
the safety of his people. In The Greenlanders’ Saga, the
two sides tensely arrange for barter even though, as the text
attests, “neither side could understand the other’s language.”
In a gesture reminiscent of Einar’s opening of his bales, the
indigenes “put down their packs and opened them up and offered
their contents, preferably in exchange for weapons,” but wisely,
“Karlsefni forbade his men to sell arms.” Why, one wonders, did
the indigenes strive to make known their high interest in metal
weapons? The answer must be that they were the same tribe that had
encountered the previous Norse visit (when Thorvald died) and that
they knew that foreign knives and swords were more durable and deadly
than their own flint blades.

Karlsefni now conceives to offer in exchange for the skins and
pelts a renewable, edible delicacy ordinary for the Norsemen but
exotic for the indigenes. As The Greenlanders’ Saga puts
it, he “hit on the idea of telling the women to carry milk out to
the Skraelings, and when the Skraelings saw the milk they wanted
nothing else.” In the sequel, “the Skraelings carried their
purchases away in their bellies,” while the Norse took the
exchangeable goods in return. On the next occasion, The Norsemen
offered the indigenes strips of brightly colored cloth, which the
indigenes again prized.

One can imagine the standard liberal-multicultural critique of
these transactions. The crafty Europeans are tricking and bilking
the indigenes. But there are two points against that critique. One
is that if any party were under threat or coercion, it would be the
Norsemen, who were immensely outnumbered by people whom they knew
from reports to be warlike. The other is that the indigenes initiate
the exchanges, which are freely negotiated. Indeed when the
indigenes return for a third visit, they come with violent intention,
the aim being not trade, but plunder. An alert Norseman catches a
Skraeling trying to steal weapons and kills him. Eirik’s Saga
describes “a fierce battle,” with the Norsemen initially on
the defensive before they drive off the assault. After two winters,
Karlsefni and his followers “made ready for the voyage and took
with them much valuable produce, vines and grapes and pelts.”
During the two-year stay, Gudrid gave birth to Karlsefni’s son.
They named him Snorri, the first European born on the North American
continent.

Freydis, daughter of Eirik and sister of Leif and Thorvald, had
accompanied Karlsefni’s expedition. Eirik-like, she played a role
in fighting off the Skraelings’ attack when, pregnant, she ran
towards the attackers beating her own breasts and shouting. She
differs, however, from such as Leif, Thorvald, and Karlsefni, not to
mention Gudrid; one might say that she more resembles the Skraelings
than her countrymen and kinsmen, as she aims to plunder, as easier
than to produce. The Greenlanders’ Saga tells how Freydis’
expedition set out in two boats, one under her leadership and the
other under the leadership of Helgi and Finnbogi; the agreement,
which Freydis had no intention of honoring, was that the two crews
would work for equal shares in the profit. The plan called for two
parties to be equal in number, but Freydis secretly shipped
additional men, so that her party outnumbered that of the brothers.

In Vinland, where Freydis makes use of Leif’s houses, the
expedition follows the usual routine, fishing, hunting, felling
timber and setting it out to cure. They amassed considerable goods
and prepared the houses for winter. (The brothers built their own
houses when Freydis refused to share Leif’s with them.) One night,
Freydis told her husband Thorvard that Finnbogi has assaulted her;
she taunted Thorvard with being too cowardly to avenge the insult.
When Thorvard “could bear her taunts no longer,” he “told his
men to get up at once and take their weapons.” They broke in while
Helgi, Finnbogi, and their followers slept, slaughtering the men
straight away. When Freydis insisted that they slaughter the women
too, the men balked. “Give me an axe,” Freydis said; “this was
done, and she herself killed the women, all five of them.”

Later, as rumor of the killings circulated, Leif himself “seized
three of Freydis’ men and tortured them into revealing everything
that had happened.” Leif could not bring himself to punish his
sister, but he disowned her and the community shunned her.

By contrast, at the time when Freydis returned, “Karlsefni had
prepared his ship and sailed away”; he arrived in Norway, where he
sold his cargo, after which he and Gudrid “were made much of by the
noblest in the country.” The couple with their son settled in
Iceland, where they built up a prosperous farm, Glaumby. After
Karlsefni’s death, Gudrid made a pilgrimage to Rome; on her return,
she found that her son Snorri had built a church on his land,
whereupon she “became a nun and stayed there as an anchoress for
the rest of her life.”

The morality of The Vinland Sagas is stark, but difficult
to argue away and tantalizingly applicable to our own condition.
There are two types of people: producers and plunderers. Producers
recognize their ethical kinship with other people whose cooperation
they seek through offers of generous collaboration, as in Karlsefni’s
joint-stock company; and these collaborations increase wealth
generally while seeing to its just distribution. The plunderers
recognize no such ties, disdain work, and see themselves as entitled
to the productivity of others. Plunder is the wage of a zero-sum
game. It leads to nothing but extinction.

Did the Vinland project end with Freydis’ “horrible deed,”
as Leif characterizes it in The Greenlanders’ Saga? John
Haywood, writing in The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings,
avers that, “Voyages from treeless Greenland to collect timber in
Markland [Labrador] continued as late as 1347.” Researchers
Richard
Nielsen and Scott F. Wolter have recently dated the
notorious Kensington Rune Stone, found in Minnesota in 1898, to the
Fourteenth Century; and they have therefore positively reconsidered
its authenticity, long doubted. If this reconsideration were valid and the date true, then the Western voyages would not only have continued after A.D. 1012; but they must have penetrated up the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes, as far west as Lake Superior.

I would like to thank both KO and Traveller for their appreciative remarks. I concur with KO that Njal’s Saga is the supreme example of the saga-literature generally.

On the Norman polity in Sicily, as mentioned by Traveller: I know only a little and would be grateful to any Journal reader who supplied a discussion. King Roger famously had a Muslim advisor or prime minister, Idris; Norman Sicily was a sufficient power that the Byzantine emperors had to take its existence into consideration when they contemplated policy for the Western Mediterranean. Sicily has always been a crossroads, with Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans contending for possession of it in ancient times; and Arabs, Normans, native Sicilians, and Byzantine and Papal armies in the medieval centuries. The Viking states outside of Scandinavia tended to be opportunistic and short-lived, as in Scotland, England, and Ireland; and so too in Normandy and in Sicily. Of course, by the time the Norman dukes were ruling Sicily, they were likely more French than Norwegian in language and culture. We might also recall that the Vikings went east as well as west and south, and that the earliest Slavic polities, Kiev and Novgorod, were founded by Swedish adventurers. But here too the original Scandinavian elites were quickly absorbed by the native population.

I saw an English television series a couple of years ago about the Kingdom of Sicily.
My reaction was WOW, the liberty, the open mind of the early kings was astonishing, they not only had muslim advisors, they also spoke Arabic and invited Arab artists of all kinds. They had intensive trade links with the Arabs and all this notwithstanding the fact that the Pope was their ultimate boss.
At the same time they were ex-crusaders who opened their minds and borders for this exchange between cultures.
It seems that the Vikings learned something while conquering territories.

Thanks, again.
Interesting as far as conflict handling is concerned, like KO points out.
In this respect, did you ever compare the Sicily County and afterwards Kingdom and its unbelievable modern handling of the crossway of cultures Sicily was in those days with the Viking's own culture. When I first read and heard about the Sicily Kingdom I couldn't believe it was a Viking Kingdom and there policies were Viking policies.

Yes, a most excellent, very rich article that greatly adds to the enjoyment of the Vinland sagas. Warmest thanks to Prof. Bertonneau, again! As he shows, the Vinland sagas are of interest for the development of Western Civilization, and they are clearly of direct interest for American history.

For the benefit of anyone coming to the sagas for the first time, however, I would like to add that Njal's Saga is arguably the masterpiece of them all. It focuses on conflict and modes of conflict resolution, with the characters pitching from feud to public litigation to private arbitration in search of a rational end to their disputes. Magnificent character portraits abound. There is also a delightful, interesting, rather terse depiction of the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, which is pertinent to Prof. Bertonneau's discussion, and which I will refrain from spoiling.

I would like to thank Siegetower for his kind comment. The saga literature is fascinating, among many other reasons, for its appreciation of individuals, and for its objectivity of presentation. Eirik, Leif, Gudrid, and Freydis are all cases in point. I am particularly impressed by the fact that the saga-authors, although they belong to the Christian era of Iceland, conspicuously refrain from condemning the heathen past. In Norway, the kings imposed Christianity from above, often by brutally suppressing heathenism; in Iceland, the people, through the Althing, voted to adopt Christianity (this was in the summer of the year 1000). But the decision to become a Christian community included various considerations, for example, that those who continued to worship the old gods in private would be free from harassment. The later transition from Catholic to Protestant Christianity was not so easygoing. By that time, the Icelanders had submitted to the rule of the Norwegian kings. The Protestant changeover came violently, as it did elsewhere.

And old fashioned in that it has a moral to tell for all people who would open their minds to learn it. Well done and well written.

As an Anglo-Saxon with family history going back to Lancashire in the North -West of England, where there wasn't much influence or integration of Norsemen as opposed to the North-East, in fanciful moments I wish that my bloodline includes some stock from those most industrious people. In these bleak multi cult times the Norsemen are examples to us all.

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